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Navigating Israel’s Nuclear ‘Samson Option’
In any rationality-based strategic calculus, the “Samson Option” — which refers to an Israeli nuclear strike — would refer not to a last-resort act of national vengeance, but to a persuasive limit on existential threats.
When taken together with Israel’s intentionally ambiguous nuclear strategy, an outdated doctrine commonly referred to as “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” or “Israel’s bomb in the basement” (amimut in Hebrew), more compelling threat postures could prove effective. To be truly promising, however, an Israeli Samson Option would need to 1) coincide with an incremental and selective end to “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” and 2) pertain to Iran directly, not just to terrorist proxies.
There are no conceivable circumstances in which Samson could offer Israel useful applications regarding Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, or any other jihadist foes.
Israeli strategists will need to consider factors beyond what is taking place right now between Israel and its jihadist adversaries. Since military crises in other parts of the world could spill over into the Middle East, strategic planners should begin to clarify Israel’s operational preparations regarding Samson. This is especially the case where a spill-over could involve the threat or actual use of nuclear weapons.
Though Iran is still “only” pre-nuclear, it already has the capacity to use radiation dispersal weapons and/or launch conventional rockets at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. Moreover, Tehran has close ties to Pyongyang, and it is not inconceivable that a nuclear North Korea might operate as a strategic stand-in for a not-yet-nuclear Iran.
For disciplined Israeli strategists, geopolitical context matters. There can be no logic-based assessment of probabilities because the events under consideration would be unprecedented. In logic and mathematics, true probabilities can never be ascertained out of nothing. They can be drawn only from the determinable frequency of pertinent past events.
These are not narrowly political or intuitive calculations. As an operationally meaningful concept, the Samson Option references a residual deterrence doctrine founded upon credible threats (whether implicit or explicit) of overwhelming nuclear retaliation or counter-retaliation. These are unconventional threats to thwart more-or-less expected enemy state aggressions. Reasonably, any such massive last-resort doctrine could enter into force only where enemy aggressions would imperil Israel’s continued existence as a viable nation-state. In the absence of expected aggressions from Iran, Israel would more prudently rely upon an “escalation ladder.”
For doctrinal clarity, Israel’s nuclear forces should always remain oriented to deterrence ex ante, never to revenge ex post. It would do Israel little good to proffer Samson-level threats in response to “ordinary” or less than massive forms of enemy attack. Even where the principal operational object for Israel would be counter-terrorist success against Hamas, Hezbollah, etc., invoking Samson could make sense only vis-à-vis Hamas state patron Iran or Iran’s nuclear patron North Korea. In such nuanced calculations, assumptions of rationality could prove problematic.
For Israel’s nuclear deterrent to work against a still non-nuclear Iran, it is virtually inconceivable that it would need to include a Samson Option. In any crisis between Israel and Iran involving jihadist terror, Israel could almost certainly achieve “escalation dominance” without employing Samson. But if Iran were already an authentic nuclear adversary, its capacity to enhance surrogate terror capabilities would exceed any pre-nuclear constraints of competitive risk-taking. In these circumstances, Samson could prove necessary.
Israel’s basis for launching a preemptive strike against Iran without Samson could be rational only before that state turned verifiably nuclear. A foreseeable non-Samson plan for preemption would involve more direct Iranian involvement in the continuing terror war against Israel on behalf of Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. By setting back Iranian nuclear efforts and infrastructures, such pre-Samson involvement could offer Israel an asymmetrical power advantage in the region. This larger opportunity would be the result of Israel’s not yet having to fear a nuclear war against Iran.
There would be related matters of intra-crisis communications. As an element of any ongoing strategic dialogue, the basic message of an Israeli Samson Option would need to remain uniform and consistent. It should signal to an adversary state the unstated promise of a counter-city (“counter value”) nuclear reprisal. Israel would also need to avoid signaling to its Iranian adversary any sequential gradations of nuclear warfighting.
Israel’s “bottom line” reasoning would likely be as follows: For Israel, exercising a Samson Option threat is not apt to deter any Iranian aggressions short of nuclear and/or massively large-scale conventional (including biological) first strikes. Therefore, Samson can do little to prevent Iran from its enthusiastic support of anti-Israel jihadists.
Whatever the Samson Option’s precise goals, its key objective should remain constant and conspicuous. This objective is to keep Israel “alive,” not (as presented in Biblical imagery) to stop the Jewish State from “dying alone.” In this peremptory objective, Israeli policy should deviate from the Biblical Samson narrative.
Ultimately, Samson, in all relevant military nuclear matters, should be about how best to manage urgent processes of strategic dissuasion. At least for now, Israel’s presumed nuclear strategy, though not yet clearly articulated, is oriented toward nuclear war avoidance and not to nuclear war fighting. From all standpoints, this represents Israel’s only correct orientation.
The Samson Option could never protect Israel as a comprehensive nuclear strategy by itself. This option should never be confused with Israel’s more generalized or “broad spectrum” nuclear strategy, one that would seek to maximize deterrence at incrementally less apocalyptic levels of military engagement.
At this point, various questions will need to be raised. Above all: How can the Samson Option best serve Israel’s general strategic requirements? Though the primary mission of Israel’s nuclear weapons should be to preserve the Jewish State — not to wreak havoc upon foes when all else has seemingly been lost — obvious preparations for a Samson Option could still improve Israel’s nuclear deterrence and preemption capabilities.
As soon as possible, even during the current Gaza war with Hamas, Jerusalem will need to shift from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” to “selective nuclear disclosure.” Among other things, this explicit shift would allow Israel to clarify that its nuclear weapons are not too large for actual operational use against Iran. In essence, this complex clarification would be the reciprocal of Israel’s Samson Option and would cover the complete spectrum of Israel’s nuclear deterrence options.
There will be corresponding legal issues. Israeli resorts to conventional and defensive first strikes could prove permissible or law-enforcing under authoritative international law. In such cases, Israeli preemptions would contain a jurisprudential counterpart to nuclear weapons use. This counterpart should be referenced formally as “anticipatory self-defense.”
Concerning long-term Israeli nuclear deterrence, recognizable preparations for a Samson Option could help convince Iran or other designated enemy states that massive aggressions against Israel would never be gainful. This could prove most compelling if Israel’s “Samson weapons” were 1) coupled with some explicit level of nuclear disclosure (thereby effectively ending Israel’s longstanding posture of nuclear ambiguity); 2) recognizably invulnerable to enemy first strikes; and 3) “counter-city”/”counter-value” in declared mission function. Additionally, in view of what nuclear strategists sometimes refer to as the “rationality of pretended irrationality,” Samson could enhance Israeli nuclear deterrence by demonstrating a more evident Israeli willingness to take existential risks.
On occasion, the nuclear deterrence benefits of “pretended irrationality” could depend on prior Iranian awareness of Israel’s counter-city or counter-value targeting posture. Such a posture was recommended some 20 years ago by the Project Daniel Group in its confidential report to then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. Residually, however, to best ensure that Israel could still engage in nuclear warfighting if its counter-value nuclear deterrence were to fail, Israel would more openly adopt a “mixed” counter-value/counter-force nuclear targeting doctrine.
In reference to strategies of preemption, Israeli preparations for a Samson Option — explicit, recognizable and not just sotto voce — could help convince Israel’s leadership that defensive first strikes could sometimes be gainful.
In all cases involving Samson and Israeli nuclear deterrence, visible last-resort nuclear preparations could enhance Israel’s preemption options by underscoring a bold national willingness to take existential risks. However, displaying such risks could become a double-edged sword. The fact that these are uncharted waters and there exist no precedents from which to extrapolate science-based probabilities means Israel would need to move with determination and caution.
What about “pretended irrationality?” That complex calculus could become a related part of Samson. Israel’s leaders will need to remain mindful of this integration. Brandished too “irrationally,” Israeli preparations for a Samson Option, though unwitting, could encourage Iranian preemptions. This peril would be underscored by pressures on both Israel and Iran to achieve intra-crisis “escalation dominance.” Also significant in this unpredictable environment of competitive risk-taking would be either or both sides’ deployment of expanding missile defenses.
This hearkens back to the early days of Cold War nuclear deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union, days of “mutually assured destruction” or MAD. Either Israeli or Iranian efforts to reduce nuclear retaliatory force vulnerabilities could incentivize the other to more hurriedly strike first; that is, to “preempt the preemption.” In reference to international law, close attention would then need to be directed toward the peremptory rules of “military necessity.”
If left to itself, neither deterred nor preempted, Iran could threaten to bring the Jewish State face-to-face with Dante’s Inferno. Such a portentous scenario has been made more credible by the recent strategic strengthening of Iran by its tighter alignment with North Korea and its surrogate fighters in Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. At some not-too-distant point, a coordinated Iran-Hezbollah offensive (complementing the Iran-Hamas offensive in Gaza) could signal more imminent existential perils for Israel. By definition, all such synergistic intersections would be taking place within the broadly uncertain context of “Cold War II.”
In extremis atomicum, these hazards could become so unique and formidable that employing a Samson Option would represent the only available strategic option for Israel. In the best of all possible worlds, Israel would have no need to augment or even maintain its arsenal of deterrent threat options – especially untested nuclear components – but this ideal reconfiguration of world politics remains a long way off. In that ideal world, Israel could anticipate the replacement of realpolitik (power politics) with Westphalian international politics. Such a replacement would be based on the awareness that planet Earth is an inter-dependent and organic whole.
Plainly, the time for such replacement has not yet arrived. It follows that Jerusalem will need to prepare visibly for a possible Samson Option. The point of this doctrinal imperative would not be to give preference to any actual applications of Samson, but to best ensure that Israel could deter all survival-threatening enemy aggressions.
For the moment, Israel remains in protracted war with Hamas. It can succeed in this conflict only by weakening jihadist state-sponsor Iran. In the best-case scenario, Iran would remain non-nuclear and Israeli management of Iranian terror support would remain within the bounds of conventional deterrence. If, however, Iran were permitted to cross the nuclear weapons threshold by acquiring chain-reaction nuclear weapons (not just radiation dispersal weapons), Israel’s subsequent efforts at deterrence of Iran would become vastly more problematic. At that point, ipso facto, Israel could require a Samson Option to maintain its “escalation dominance.”
There does exist an intermediate, if paradoxical, scenario for Israel. If Iran should become involved in any direct military action against Israel before becoming a fully nuclear adversary, the Jewish State could find itself with a strategic and law-enforcing opportunity to preemptively destroy Iranian nuclear infrastructures before they become operational. Though advancing such a scenario could also create the false impression of planned Israeli aggression, it would more correctly represent permissible self-defense. Most importantly, of course, such an Israeli preemption could prevent a full-scale nuclear war with Iran.
How should Israel navigate chaos? Whether in the Old Testament or in more-or-less synchronous Greek and Roman thought, chaos can be understood as something potentially positive: an intellectual tabula rasa which, if thoughtfully “filled in,” can prepare the world for all possibilities, both sacred and profane. In essence, chaos can represent an inchoate place from which an expanding civilizational opportunity can still originate.
Such thinking is unorthodox, to be sure, but for Israel it could prove manifestly useful. With such thinking, chaos is never just a “predator” that swallows everything whole: omnivorous, callous, indiscriminate, and without higher purpose. Here, chaos is considered instead as an auspicious “openness,” a protean realm from within which new kinds of opportunity can be revealed.
This means the chaos in the Middle East need not necessarily be interpreted by Israel’s senior military planners as a harbinger of further regional violence and instability. In some hard-to-conceptualize respects, at least, such chaos could represent a condition for national security and survival. Though there are still rough seas ahead, their waves could be harnessed for a purposeful strategic direction.
Louis René Beres, Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue, is the author of many books and articles dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war, including Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1980) and Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (D.C. Heath/Lexington, 1986). His twelfth book, Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy, was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 2016. A version of this article was originally published by The BESA Center.
The post Navigating Israel’s Nuclear ‘Samson Option’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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After False Dawns, Gazans Hope Trump Will Force End to Two-Year-Old War

Palestinians walk past a residential building destroyed in previous Israeli strikes, after Hamas agreed to release hostages and accept some other terms in a US plan to end the war, in Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
Exhausted Palestinians in Gaza clung to hopes on Saturday that US President Donald Trump would keep up pressure on Israel to end a two-year-old war that has killed tens of thousands and displaced the entire population of more than two million.
Hamas’ declaration that it was ready to hand over hostages and accept some terms of Trump’s plan to end the conflict while calling for more talks on several key issues was greeted with relief in the enclave, where most homes are now in ruins.
“It’s happy news, it saves those who are still alive,” said 32-year-old Saoud Qarneyta, reacting to Hamas’ response and Trump’s intervention. “This is enough. Houses have been damaged, everything has been damaged, what is left? Nothing.”
GAZAN RESIDENT HOPES ‘WE WILL BE DONE WITH WARS’
Ismail Zayda, 40, a father of three, displaced from a suburb in northern Gaza City where Israel launched a full-scale ground operation last month, said: “We want President Trump to keep pushing for an end to the war, if this chance is lost, it means that Gaza City will be destroyed by Israel and we might not survive.
“Enough, two years of bombardment, death and starvation. Enough,” he told Reuters on a social media chat.
“God willing this will be the last war. We will hopefully be done with the wars,” said 59-year-old Ali Ahmad, speaking in one of the tented camps where most Palestinians now live.
“We urge all sides not to backtrack. Every day of delay costs lives in Gaza, it is not just time wasted, lives get wasted too,” said Tamer Al-Burai, a Gaza City businessman displaced with members of his family in central Gaza Strip.
After two previous ceasefires — one near the start of the war and another earlier this year — lasted only a few weeks, he said; “I am very optimistic this time, maybe Trump’s seeking to be remembered as a man of peace, will bring us real peace this time.”
RESIDENT WORRIES THAT NETANYAHU WILL ‘SABOTAGE’ DEAL
Some voiced hopes of returning to their homes, but the Israeli military issued a fresh warning to Gazans on Saturday to stay out of Gaza City, describing it as a “dangerous combat zone.”
Gazans have faced previous false dawns during the past two years, when Trump and others declared at several points during on-off negotiations between Hamas, Israel and Arab and US mediators that a deal was close, only for war to rage on.
“Will it happen? Can we trust Trump? Maybe we trust Trump, but will Netanyahu abide this time? He has always sabotaged everything and continued the war. I hope he ends it now,” said Aya, 31, who was displaced with her family to Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.
She added: “Maybe there is a chance the war ends at October 7, two years after it began.”
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Mass Rally in Rome on Fourth Day of Italy’s Pro-Palestinian Protests

A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator waves a Palestinian flag during a national protest for Gaza in Rome, Italy, October 4, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Claudia Greco
Large crowds assembled in central Rome on Saturday for the fourth straight day of protests in Italy since Israel intercepted an international flotilla trying to deliver aid to Gaza, and detained its activists.
People holding banners and Palestinian flags, chanting “Free Palestine” and other slogans, filed past the Colosseum, taking part in a march that organizers hoped would attract at least 1 million people.
“I’m here with a lot of other friends because I think it is important for us all to mobilize individually,” Francesco Galtieri, a 65-year-old musician from Rome, said. “If we don’t all mobilize, then nothing will change.”
Since Israel started blocking the flotilla late on Wednesday, protests have sprung up across Europe and in other parts of the world, but in Italy they have been a daily occurrence, in multiple cities.
On Friday, unions called a general strike in support of the flotilla, with demonstrations across the country that attracted more than 2 million, according to organizers. The interior ministry estimated attendance at around 400,000.
Italy’s right-wing government has been critical of the protests, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni suggesting that people would skip work for Gaza just as an excuse for a longer weekend break.
On Saturday, Meloni blamed protesters for insulting graffiti that appeared on a statue of the late Pope John Paul II outside Rome’s main train station, where Pro-Palestinian groups have been holding a protest picket.
“They say they are taking to the streets for peace, but then they insult the memory of a man who was a true defender and builder of peace. A shameful act committed by people blinded by ideology,” she said in a statement.
Israel launched its Gaza offensive after Hamas terrorists staged a cross border attack on October 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 people hostage.
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Hamas Says It Agrees to Release All Israeli Hostages Under Trump Gaza Plan

Smoke rises during an Israeli military operation in Gaza City, as seen from the central Gaza Strip, October 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
Hamas said on Friday it had agreed to release all Israeli hostages, alive or dead, under the terms of US President Donald Trump’s Gaza proposal, and signaled readiness to immediately enter mediated negotiations to discuss the details.